We’ve all seen the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, when John Cleese asks, ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ Well, they were the first to, after conquest, subsume the defeated culture into their own culture and to claim the achievements of said culture as their own. So, the question should be: What have the Greeks ever done for us? A hell of a lot!

Incidentally, the Greeks were the opposite of the Romans when it came to conquest. The Greeks had no need of other cultures, their own culture was too strong to be influenced by another culture. Alexander the Great, the Macedonian Greek colonist, proves this point! When the Greeks settled somewhere, they built shrines to their gods. In the same way, American troops in the First World War arrived in Europe with all of their home comforts, baseball, cigarettes, chewing gum and, of course, jazz music. That was last century, the American century, and, like all dynasties, it too will end.

This is the ‘strength’ (the power to resist other influences) Nietzsche always lauds in his many paeans to the Greeks, something he also appreciated in the French Enlightenment – Voltaire not Rousseau! The French, according to Nietzsche, were perfectly content in their own plumage, they weren’t even interested in learning other languages. Sounds priggish, and, of course, done without style, it is chauvinistic. It’s a difficult balancing act: a dance, as Nietzsche would say.